Erika Bachiochi

A direct cash benefit spreads the overwhelming costs of raising the next generation to the community, allowing parents more freedom from market work to give their children the time and attention they need to grow into happy and productive adults.

The Equality Act’s sponsors seem to be trying to retool the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, transforming it from a law that is explicitly neutral as to abortion into a mechanism that may well be construed to require health care providers to perform abortions and states to fund them.

Sen. Mitt Romney’s “Family Security Act” has many merits as a response to the bleak trends highlighted by the pandemic. More important still, it would serve as an overdue corrective to liberalism’s devastating effects on the family.

However much we might like our daughters and sons to see their fundamental equality emblazoned in the text of the Constitution, strict equality will not give mothers and fathers the support they need. A more intentional and robust family policy, on the other hand, just might.

The question that divides us is how we ought to respond to reproductive asymmetry: the reality that women carry disproportionate burdens due to our special role in human reproduction.

Given the strength of Judge Barrett’s record, perhaps playing to the fears of the American public — who aren’t likely to be reading commentaries on the upcoming Supreme Court term but are voting soon — was the Democrats’ only play.

Feminism is changing, and Barrett’s replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg will show how.

Justice Ginsburg lived a heroic life in many ways. But to truly realize across our culture her noble vision for caregiving, we will have to point our children to others, those who recognize unborn children not as potential hindrances to the contributions we might make in the world but as reasons for greater solidarity with one another.

The suffragists worked for seventy years to convince both males and other females that women ought to share in the political responsibilities of republican government. The arguments that won the day one hundred years ago should help us think correctly about rights today.

Pro-lifers have waited nearly a half century for the Court to repudiate its entire ill-founded abortion jurisprudence.

A jurisprudence that treated women’s interests as distinct from those of abortion providers might come rather to see abortion for what it really is: a quick, easy, and relatively cheap way to keep women from demanding more, more of men, more of employers, more of medicine, more of the community at large.

Equality premised on the power to end life is not true equality at all.